Ida Applebroog

The Heretics uncovers the inside story of a pivotal force in the "second wave" of the Women's Movement. Director Joan Braderman, who followed her dream of becoming a filmmaker to New York City in 1971, where she joined the feminist art collective Heresies at the epicenter of the 1970's art world in lower Manhattan, charts the collective's story for the first time in a feature-length film or video.

Belladonna is a brutal testimony of violence and the family. A series of actors, presented as "talking heads," recite chilling lines that accelerate into a horrifying litany, a twisted family romance of child abuse and male violence.

'The almost lyrical Letters to Dad, is a meditation on authority that superimposes the spectre of Jonestown over the relatively fresh faces of the parapunk art world; the film takes on a musical form - like a 20th-century ballad composed of subliminal behavior cues, advertising testimonials, and the text of the National Enquirer.' J.Hoberman, Village Voice 1978. Courtesy of Beth B and Scott B. (Lux)